Talking Location With Martine Bailey – YORKSHIRE

15th April 2025

#TalkingLocationWith… Martine Bailey, author of Isolation Ward, set in YORKSHIRE

I knew right from the beginning that the setting for my latest book, Isolation Ward, would be the north of England and most crucially, Yorkshire. The book follows on from the chilling events in Sharp Scratch, when Lorraine Quick, a young hospital Personnel Officer, identifies a killer at her hospital thanks to the personality tests she administers to staff. Sharp Scratch is set in the 1980s in a crumbling Salford hospital, based on my own time as a new graduate – though thankfully minus the murders! This time I wanted to send Lorraine away from the city to a more challenging environment.

Once again I drew on my own NHS experience by sending Lorraine north to an isolated hospital at the centre of a national scandal.  Windwell is a fictional village with a dark history, the location of a forbidding asylum currently awaiting demolition. This vast hospital is in part inspired by High Roydes Asylum in Menston, Yorkshire, a surviving Victorian ‘palace of the mad’ that for long years stood empty, tempting urban explorers and ghost-hunters. I have embellished it with claustrophobic underground tunnels, based on the secret tunnels hidden from the public found beneath many old hospitals. The looming clock tower overshadows a warren of derelict wards, its hands motionless at just before midnight.

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High Roydes Asylum, courtesy of photographer Tom Blackwell

Next door to fictional Windwell asylum, a modern replacement is being built, a state-of-the-art top security hospital inspired by my experiences at Ashworth Hospital, a high-security psychiatric facility housing some of the most dangerous criminals in the country. My role had been the assessment of staff in the aftermath of one of a series of notorious scandals. I will never forget the clammy fear I felt as I passed inside the fortress of concrete walls and through seemingly endless security airlocks displaying lists of prohibited items, from biros to Blu-tack, that might be crafted into weapons or escape aids. Most chilling was the Personality Disorder Unit, housing mostly young, bored men diagnosed, in the language of the day, as psychopaths. This inspired the novel’s first brutal murder, in a brand new seclusion cell where the Administrator has been lured by a forged message.

Though I was born in North Manchester, I also spent some years in Yorkshire’s ‘alternative capital’, Hebden Bridge. In Isolation Ward, Lorraine and her almost-old-flame DS Diaz cross the moors to escape Windwell’s oppressive atmosphere and enjoy time out at Hebden’s indie music venue, the Trades Club. I also recalled how Hebden was known for its darker side, behind the hippy collectives and vegetarian cafes. In 1980 police constable Alan Godfrey claimed to spot a UFO flying above the road in nearby Todmorden, spawning a number of urban myths of strange lights and alien abductions. Magic and superstition were rife in the town, centred on a magic shop that sold tarot cards and spell-casting paraphernalia. The town had its own tragic tale of murder, too. In 1994, 13-year-old Lindsay Rimer disappeared after visiting the town’s Spar shop a few days after the annual mass gathering for Bonfire Night. Her body was discovered in the canal the following year, confirming that she had been strangled. Lindsay’s murder has never been solved.

Hebden Bridge in 1988, courtesy of Wikimedia Creative Commons Share-Alike

Though not directly linked to these events, I wanted to give my story a flavour of the area’s preoccupation with ritual and superstition. Living near the hospital are a group of thrill-seeking teenagers including Oonah, a self-professed white witch. The teenagers break into the derelict asylum for magic mushroom parties, until their leader Tommo is found dead in the underground furnace room. The puzzle for Diaz and Lorraine is how Tommo’s death could be linked to that of the strait-laced Administrator?

Central to the book is of course Yorkshire’s mesmerizing landscape – particularly the empty  triangle of moorland between Hebden Bridge, Burnley, and the wild country depicted by Emily Bronte in Wuthering Heights. It is a landscape said to lie upon the largest cave network in Britain, passing beneath Yorkshire and Lancashire to emerge in Cumbria. A favourite real-life cavern I transplanted is Knaresborough’s Chapel of Our Lady of the Crag, a medieval shrine burrowed into the rock visited by pilgrims for centuries.

© Photo Martine Bailey

Though I have dotted the landscape with a few imaginary features – a modern motel beside an inky black reservoir, and an ancient hall hiding a holy well in its cellar – it is the Yorkshire of the lonely wind ruffling the high tops, and the lonely millstone grit farmsteads, that drew me to write about one of Britain’s most evocative regions.

Martine Bailey

Isolation Ward by Martine Bailey  is published by Allison & Busby in hardback and ebook on 17 April and audio in July 2025.

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